Thinking in Systems: International Bestseller

there are questions you need to ask that will help you decide how good a representation of reality is the underlying model. Are the driving factors likely to unfold this way? (What are birth rate and death rate likely to do?) If they did, would the system react this way? (Do birth and death rates really cause the population stock to behave as we th

The central question of economic development is how to keep the reinforcing loop of capital accumulation from growing more slowly than the reinforcing loop of population growth—so that people are getting richer instead of poorer.4

You’ll be thinking not in terms of a static world, but a dynamic one. You’ll stop looking for who’s to blame; instead you’ll start asking, “What’s the system?” The concept of feedback opens up the idea that a system can cause its own behavior.

This kind of stabilizing, goal-seeking, regulating loop is called a balancing feedback loop, so I put a B inside the loop in the diagram. Balancing feedback loops are goal-seeking or stability-seeking. Each tries to keep a stock at a given value or within a range of values. A balancing feedback loop opposes whatever direction of change is imposed o

Corporate systems, military systems, ecological systems, economic systems, living organisms, are arranged in hierarchies. It is no accident that that is so. If subsystems can largely take care of themselves, regulate themselves, maintain themselves, and yet serve the needs of the larger system, while the larger system coordinates and enhances the f

Hierarchical systems evolve from the bottom up. The purpose of the upper layers of the hierarchy is to serve the purposes of the lower layers.

If the news did a better job of putting events into historical context, we would have better behavior-level understanding, which is deeper than event-level understanding.

Everything we think we know about the world is a model. Every word and every language is a model. All maps and statistics, books and databases, equations and computer programs are models. So are the ways I picture the world in my head—my mental models. None of these is or ever will be the real world. Our models usually have a strong congruence with

And that’s one reason why systems of all kinds surprise us. We are too fascinated by the events they generate. We pay too little attention to their history. And we are insufficiently skilled at seeing in their history clues to the structures from which behavior and events

Like resilience, self-organization is often sacrificed for purposes of short-term productivity and stability. Productivity and stability are the usual excuses for turning creative human beings into mechanical adjuncts to production processes. Or for narrowing the genetic variability of crop plants. Or for establishing bureaucracies and theories of